Music: Flaming Lips are having a ball

Wayne Coyne, the flamboyant singer and guitarist for the rock ’n’ roll circus known as the Flaming Lips, credits a robbery for rewarding him with a musical career that’s now lasted 30 years.

By Ed Symkus

Milford Daily News

By Ed Symkus

Posted Sep. 26, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Sep 26, 2013 at 8:20 PM

By Ed Symkus

Posted Sep. 26, 2013 at 12:01 AM
Updated Sep 26, 2013 at 8:20 PM

» Social News

Wayne Coyne, the flamboyant singer and guitarist for the rock ’n’ roll circus known as the Flaming Lips, credits a robbery for rewarding him with a musical career that’s now lasted 30 years.

For the record, he was on the wrong side of the gun.

Coyne, 52, who will front the Lips at Agganis Arena in Boston on Sept. 30, was, at the time, working as a fry cook at Long John Silver’s in Oklahoma City. Warning: He enjoys telling long stories, and casual cursing comes naturally to him.

"My dad had warehouse jobs, where he unloaded trucks and delivered furniture, and I loved my parents and my brothers, but I didn’t want to do what he did [when I grew up]," said Coyne. "I just wanted to play music. When we got robbed, the way it affected me is I was temporarily relieved of all these petty little things that stressed me out. Up until then I hadn’t considered that I was even alive. I just was alive, and I didn’t think about it. But in my mind, laying on the floor that day, I really did think that I was gonna die. That was the first time I ever felt that. But when I didn’t die, suddenly my life came back to me, and I was like, ‘I’m gonna DO these things! Why was I so uptight about them? I’m gonna be in a band, I’m gonna play music, and I don’t really give a sh*t what people think.’ Not that I didn’t care what my parents and brothers thought, because they always encouraged me. But that thing freed me from that for just enough time to do it. I’m not glad it happened, but to have it happen, and to have this epiphany about what is important in my life, was the best thing that ever happened to me."

Initially he wasn’t interested in having a group. He just wanted to play guitar, write his own songs, then find other people who would play them with him.

"I didn’t know how to play drums and stuff, and back then you couldn’t just record on a computer like you can now," he said, "so you had to get people together so you could hear it."

By the time he was 20, he did have a group of friends together. A year later they were calling themselves the Flaming Lips. And they were determined, from the start, not just to stand up there and play.

"We never felt that it would be very interesting just to watch us play, so we always had smoke machines and strobe lights," he said. "We just liked those things. Like a million other groups, we are some version of the sons of Pink Floyd. Punk rock and Pink Floyd and all those things together gave us the reason to say, ‘We want to be a group!’ So there was always a little bit of a visual aspect to it.

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"It’s also a way of keeping the audience’s attention," he added. "Lights aren’t the enemy of music. Lights are the f*ckin’ friend of music."

But there’s plenty more than lights and smoke in a Flaming Lips show. There’s catchy original pop music that can just as easily lean toward punk as it can slip into pop or soul or some indescribable weirdness. There are outlandish costumes. There might even be dancers and jugglers. One never knows what Coyne has planned. But for the past decade, there’s always been the big plastic ball, an immense prop that Coyne climbs inside of and then, like a giant hamster in a wheel, roams out on top of the audience.

"I was making the movie ‘Christmas on Mars’ in 2001," he said of the ball’s genesis. "I play a Martian in the movie, and his spaceship is a bubble" – an idea he attributes to Glinda, the good witch of the South, making her entry in a bubble in "The Wizard of Oz."

"I wanted to arrive in a bubble," he said, "because I think ‘Christmas on Mars’ is like a version of ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ It even kind of sounds like ‘Wizard of Oz.’ So I thought that I’d just go out and buy one. Well, I couldn’t find one, so in the movie I fake it. It’s a bunch of computer stuff I put together that makes it look like I’m in a bubble. But at the moment that I was making the fake bubble in the movie, this Italian guy gets hold of us and says, ‘I heard you’ve been looking for one of these bubbles. I make them and I’ll send you one.’ And as soon as I got it, we were on the way to play one of our big shows at Coachella [Valley Music & Arts Festival], in 2004, and I took it with me and said, ‘OK, I’m just gonna get in it at the beginning of the show and see what happens. So I got in it and went out in the crowd, and had about a hundred thousand people take a picture of it, and it’s been like that ever since."

So there’s always the ball in a Flaming Lips show, and the set list always has the song that’s come closest to being a hit for them: "Do You Realize?"

"We’ll do a lot of the new stuff mixed in with what we think is a good bunch of the old popular stuff, and we always make up some stuff and play that, too," said Coyne. "Our show has got this arc of these are the things we want to say, and ‘Do You Realize?’ is simply one of them. I think it has a lot of impact, a lot of emotional power. When that many people have a connection to a song, you can be standing next to someone, and if you didn’t know the song at all, and these people next to you are so overwhelmed by it, it’ll get you. Being in the presence of someone so affected by it, affects you, too.

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"We’re doing everything we can to f*ckin’ completely obliterate your perception of what you thought was gonna happen here," he added. "Just get in here, and let the music and the volume and the lights and the intensity and the love have its power on you."